The Leash

The analogy is messy, but I spend most days on a leash of moderate slack. On a tighter rein, when food and the anxieties I attach to it jerk me from despair to elation to exhaustion at each meal, I have a tendency to wallow in the brain/body God gave me. But these days, 80 lbs lighter than I once was, a runner, I've loosened that anxiety's grip on my days.  As long as I can run. As long as I control the majority of meals. As long as there aren't too many surprises. There are variables, of course, but that leash has lengthened in the last several years, and I'm grateful. All but my closest friends would likely dismiss the anxieties forever intertwined with the fork in my hand. The dearest ones understand when I say I can't handle a specific restaurant or need to cook for myself for a few days. They don't understand the leash but they respect its power.

I served a meal at a homeless shelter tonight.

My church houses a shelter in the winter. Fifty or so men and women knock on those church doors at 6 pm, eat a meal, and fall asleep tucked out of this bitter Minnesota winter. They bring only what they can carry, which is not much, and they can store nothing for the following day.  If it can't be slung over a shoulder or tucked in a pocket, it's too grand an object for ownership during this season of their lives. For some, the season is obviously long.  For others, they appear new to that floor pallet, shivering and quiet in their realization that this is their best option tonight.

We served a simple meal, taco salads with rice, beans, beef, and the requisite toppings of cheese and guacamole. The leash tightens. I see those spoonfuls and my brain automatically calculates the caloric damage of each choice. There are caveats, of course.  Guacamole is high fat but it's "good" fat.  Beef may be high calorie but it's high protein.  Chips are caloric bombs of no nutritional value.  Don't get me started on the brownies.

I have never been hungry in my life.  Not legitimately hungry.  My stomach has growled, I've grown light-headed, I've torn into a meal with the exclamation that I am starving. But at no point has that hunger been bone deep or anxious.  As an adult, any hunger has been by my own choice, my own timing.  And even in those periods of a gnawing stomach, I know exactly when the feeling will fade.  And the food involved?  It is always food I choose.  It's food I buy, cook, enjoy at a friend's house, or order at a restaurant. At no point have I ever looked at food before me and made my choice based on not knowing specifically what my choices will be tomorrow or if choices will exist.

My first impulse was to think of my attitude towards food as a luxury.  If hunger threatened me, real hunger, the calculation of fat grams in sour cream would be ridiculous.  If homelessness were my reality, my mind would be consumed with too many anxieties to allow fretting over tortilla chips. But perhaps that isn't wholly accurate.  It's less a luxury than a powerful proof that the easiest way to separate oneself from God is to look too keenly in the mirror.

It isn't narcissism. It's some hybrid of the opposite, some combination of self-pity and self-aggrandizement, a sort of self-obsession or fixation on everything that is wrong with me. There's no God in that. Only me. There's a great quote in C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce and over the last few years, as I've been a more deliberate fighter against that leash, I've reminded myself of its truth: "no natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods." Being careful and conscious of the decisions I make regarding food and exercise is neutral in and of itself.  But when it begins that slow and steady slide to self-judgment, when the slightest twinge of self-loathing kicks in, that's when that false god cracks a smile, tugs a bit tighter on my leash.

A leash that not only tugs me further from God, deeper into my own skin, but tugs me away from the world God deliberately placed me in, the people he deliberately placed in my path.

I felt the tug of that leash tonight, at a time when I should have been selflessly serving. I felt every inch of my skin, felt every calorie, and was thankful for none of it, despite being face to face with those who beamed gratitude in the midst of so much defeat. But the tug meets resistance in the best scenarios.  Perhaps it was because I was in the basement of a church, or because I chatted with Norm, who runs the shelter, about running another marathon, or because I sat next to another server who let a homeless man ramble in mind-clouded half-stories while her food grew cold. The tug loses its ability to derail me when I can remember that the moment is not about me. It's about the man weary of the cold. The pallet on the floor. The warm smile of those who serve day in, day out.

Most leashes fall apart over time.  A chink in the chain. And if tonight taught me anything, it's that the chink in my own leash, the weakness in the things of The World that separate me from God, is simple acknowledgment that the child of God across from me is hurting, too. And the moment is about them. About serving them in God's name. And not ever, ever, about me.